Homily to conclude the Triduum for Blessed Carlo

1. The King sends servants to call those invited. These can be many: prophets, apostles. But also saints, including Bl. Carlo. Carlo had already gained a profound spiritual experience of the banquet: he did not just know it from the catechism, but very deeply. He saw crowds queuing up for pop concerts and football. “If they only realised …”, he would remark, what they are missing!

2. The Eucharist is the foretaste of that wedding banquet which has been prepared for all peoples. The mountain of God with those rich juicy foods, fine strained wines and fresh and green pastures is right here. There is nothing we shall want. God is lavish, prodigal, excessive, abundant in what He gives. It is the Eucharist, Christ Himself who is our food, wine and pasture. He is the reviver of our drooping spirits and mortal bodies. He is our Eucharistic Reviver.

3. The thing which can truly prevent us from being wined and dined by Christ is our indifference. The Gospel translation we have says that the invited guests were not interested. The original suggests more that the guests didn’t even hear the servants. It says that, not paying attention one went to his farm, etc.. Their attention was absorbed in other things such that it was as if no call ever reached them. God was no longer on their radar; he was just irrelevant, if there at all; he doesn’t enter into it. He is superfluous.

4. But God won’t be mocked. The reaction He metes out in the parable is rather grim. By describing it as such, Jesus clearly wants to stir a response from his listeners. If the carrot doesn’t work, then the stick might! More deeply, the Lord is telling us that the stakes are, not just high, but eternal, when it comes to His invitation. Not our farms or businesses, but the eternal wedding banquet is what our lives are about in the end. The Eucharist is the principal means He gives us to keep alive His invitation, His call and our willingness to respond. He desires attentiveness to it, alertness!

5. And what will that banquet look like in heaven? What will it entail? Is there really to be a kitchen large enough and tables long enough to prepare and consume an eternal eating and drinking session? As Jesus Himself is our food and drink in the Eucharist, so He Himself will be our food and drink in eternity. We eat and drink to stay alive, but when death is no more, we simply live with and from the life of God. He fills us in ways that surpass our understanding this side of death. Just as with our gaze we often feel fed by the beauty of someone or something we look upon, the beauty of Christ will fulfil and surpass all our hungers and thirsts, all our yearnings and needs, all our clamour for love, all our longing for peace and for joy. And He will feed us not as isolated individuals, but in the holy communion of all the redeemed. As we are fed by Him, we will feed one another with Him. He will be all in all and we will all be in Him and in all. There is nothing we shall want. Death, shame, tears, sin will be gone and forgotten.

6. And without being too pious, I hope it is reasonable to say that, in these past few days, in our Triduum of celebrations around the Eucharist in Blessed Carlo’s company, we have experienced a little something of heaven. So many of you have opened up to the Lord: from the infants in the school with their spontaneous wonder and joy in welcoming Carlo and befriending him; from Margaret’s and Tommy’s witness before us to the power of the Eucharist in healing their woundedness; from those of you who have opened your hearts to the Lord in confession; from our sick who brought the blessing of their witness to the Cross among us; from those of you who have dared to hope for something new, something more in your spiritual lives by coming to the events of these days. All this openness, this willing vulnerability to the Lord, to Carlo and to one another is a foretaste of that transparency that is the hallmark of true communion.

7. But we have also had rich food, wine and pastures in the richness of the input during the two holy hours, the Eucharistic Rosary and the Marian Via Crucis. No two wines taste absolutely the same, no two juicy roasts are of an identical flavour. The variety and the quality of what the Lord has dispensed through our friends in these days have been deeply nourishing. And Father Darren’s spiritual and pastoral leadership has brought the crook and the staff of the Good Shepherd to bear on our souls. He has sounded the bugle, and the cry of it has been unmistakeable in its clarity, its encouragement and its inspiration. His care and blessing for the individual sheep and lambs has been a particularly moving sign of the Lamb of God among us.

8. My final thought has to go to Blessed Carlo. In a Church which has today often become so complicated and polarized, so driven by opinion and partisanship, the Lord has raised Carlo up like a flame of fire, almost like Elijah. Elijah pointed to the essential, to God, away from idols and self-concern. Carlo, in his adolescent, boyish directness, freshness and vitality is a prophet of the same ilk. Non io, ma Dio; not I, but God; happiness is looking upward, sadness looking downward; my life programme is to remain close to Jesus. He calls us back to the essential, to the bigger picture, to the transient nature of our mortal life. And he focuses all of this on the Eucharist as the highway to heaven. We could perhaps even say, the Eucharist as the true synodal highway to heaven. He knows he is only a slip-road onto that highway, as are all of the saints of the Church. And the Lord has given him to the Church of our time to direct us away from the winding and aimless roads of life which often lead nowhere. It’s not for nothing that devotion to him has spread like wildfire across the worldwide Church and that he appeals to people of all ages, cultures and conditions. Carlo, thank you for finding your way here, to us. Help us follow your highway to Jesus and to sit some day with you and all the others you are leading to him at the heavenly banquet of the beauty of the living God.